Wednesday, November 16, 2011

One Year with Bodhi Linux

Today marks the one year point from our first Bodhi Linux "0.1.0" release. I feel we have come a long way in such a short time and I am happy with everything the team has accomplished thus far. Would you believe that I first started Bodhi simply because I was tired of having to recompile E on each of my half dozen systems every week?

What has been done in the last year? Well we racked up over 150,000 ISO downloads between source forge and our torrent tracker alone (and over two-thirds of these downloads have been since our 1.0.0 release in March). In addition to disc downloads it would appear more people are actually using Bodhi due to the increase of server traffic (on our main mirror) we have experienced over the last year:

Our forums have also become fairly active. We total almost 30,000 posts now from our 1,600 users.

I would also like to take a moment to thank our community for all the contributions people have made. Our document wiki has been gaining more and more valuable content. It has become a truly great resource.

Beyond this I would like to thank everyone that has contributed a monetary donation. When the Bodhi project first started Ken and I paid out of pocket for all the server costs. Since we opened the door for donations in February we have more than covered our server costs each month. The 150$ our main mirror has cost the last couple months may not seem like much, but it is costly for two students to maintain on their own.

Looking to the future I'd just like to clear up a few release dates and plans our team currently has. First off our next update release (1.3.0) will be out towards the end of December. This will again be something current Bodhi users can easily update their systems to obtain - it's main goal is to keep the LiveCD current. We will continue to have these update releases for our 1.x.y versions until the release of Bodhi 2.0.0

Speaking of Bodhi 2.0.0 - this will be our next "major" release, meaning a full reinstall will be recommended for those wanting to move from the 1.x.y version of Bodhi. 2.0.0 will be re-based on the new Ubuntu LTS 12.04 version. With this version we also plan to add a 64bit version of Bodhi that will have workstations and multimedia production systems in mind. Since Ubuntu 12.04 releases in April expect to see Bodhi 2.0.0 sometime after that, most likely May or June.

While I'm on the topic of new architectures I'd like to also say we will be moving forward with our Debian based ARM build. I'm also excited to announce that Genesi has become a Bodhi Affiliate - meaning we plan to support our ARM build on their hardware once we get a bit further along. We also hope to extend our support to the Raspberry Pi devices as well once they are released.

Unfortunately, there's a bug with other langages packages (specialy french). After installing Bodhi Linux, when you want to update the language, you have a message saying something like "Impossible to install french packages, repair broken langages packages first" :-(

I was a hardcore KDE fan. After the release of KDE4, I moved to Gnome and remained loyal to it. At that moment I also tried Enlightenment but Enlightenment on the top of Ubuntu was horrible and I thought that Enlightenment is an unusable desktop. After the release of Gnome3, I tried Bodhi Linux and it taught me to love Enlightenment. Thanks Jeff :)

Congratulations Jeff! Have followed Bodhi since 0.1.6, started using it on the side since 1.0.0, and since 1.2.0, started using it as my main distro (thanks to unity, gnome shell and the 'new' desktop world of lack of customizability). Love what you guys are doing...the minimal install, the AppCenter on the website(one of my favourite features), the amount of info on the website and the use of E17, which is now my favourite WM. I used to like E17 but was never really able to use it the way its supposed to be, now you have given me the opportunity to do so. Well done and thank you!

64bit Gentoo (rolling release) + E17 is what any distro should strive for. Ubuntu based derivatives are just asking for trouble.Congratulations on Bodhi's anniversary. Great job so far. I wish you all the best and will keep an eye out for all the cool new changes you plan to make.--Shane

congratulation Jeff!I'm very happy with bodhi every day. Before bodhi I switched very often between various distributions. Thank you! ;-) Nice to hear, that you've planned a 64-bit-version! I wish you a lot of fun and ideas concerning bodhi!

hi, Jeff this is jackson from Austria,Using Bodhi so far has answered all my expectations about Enlightment.I will definitely stick to this distro, and I am waiting for the next Ubunto update, which will conform with the next Bodhi distro!!!!!

Congratulations to Jeff and the other at Bodhi Linux. Bodhi is by far the most exciting Linux desktop I know about. Hope you will succeed and grow to be one of the top ranked Linux desktops as you deserve

That's great. I'm using E17 since 2007 in Ubuntu and later Mint. I tried different E17 based distros, but this year I found Bodhi and now it's my main distro forever. My only complain was that it was based in Ubuntu 10. Reading in this post that the next release will be based in Ubuntu 12 is great news for me. I'm still planning on writing an article in my blog about Bodhi. At the moment I have published a serie of E17 tutorials last year if any portuguese speaker wants to see. I see that here in brazil there are lots of Bodhi users using those articles.

One thing that I want to know is about the module Drawer. Will it be available? It was one of the best modules in my opinion. Too bad that recent E17 versions are incompatible with it.

I feel bad that I could not install Bodhi Linux. Upon boot-up my screen completely blurred?? Without being able to see the options to install, I could do nothing. I hope this can be fixed soon. My latop is as follows HP Pavillion DMZ1 11.6 inch screen (1366x768), AMD Dual Core E-450 1.65Ghz CPUs, Radeon HD Fusion 6310M Graphics Card. I hope you read this Jeff I'd really like to install Bodhi on my mew laptop. Merry X-Mas to all!!!!

P.S. I checked the integrity of the DVD, good! I tried to boot up a different Linux Distro, good! As such I came to the conclusion maybe Bodhi is missing drivers my laptop needs??? if you write back here I'll check later or maybe I can meet you in IRC?

Congratulations for Bodhi first anniversary.Since its beggining Bodhi is amazing!I'm really looking forward at the 64 bit edition.Could you provide development tools such as Lazarus, FreePascal, Netbeans, Java, GCC, Firebird and FlameRobin on AppCenter?

It would be very nice to have Ruby, Lua, Vala, C, C++, Python and Perl Programming Environments, plus common development libraries on an easy way.

Search Blog

About Me

My name is Jeff Hoogland and you've landed on one of my Google pages. I currently work as adjunct faculty teaching mathematics at ITT Technical Institute in Springfield IL. I am a free software advocate and part time code jockey. You can learn more about me from my personal website.

Contact

About this Website

Thoughts on Technology is a collection of my own original writings about computers, hardware, software, and all forms of technology in the world around us today. I ask that you please do not repost my works without permission, but if you wish to please feel free to link back to my website here.

Donate

If you would like to support my projects with a financial donation you can do so via the button below.